Span is hiring a Senior Airbyte Specialist on a contract basis to act as the lead advisor for all data movement initiatives. In this role, you will partner closely with the platform engineering team to solve complex Airbyte challenges, focusing on developing and troubleshooting connectors, advising on scaling best practices, and empowering the team with deep expertise. Our culture enables ownership, autonomy, and superhuman impact.
What You'll Do
- Design, build, and maintain high-quality custom Airbyte connectors, strategically selecting the best tool for the job (Python CDK, Low-Code CDK, Connector Builder).
- Serve as the ultimate escalation point for complex connector and sync failures, diagnosing issues spanning source/destination systems, database configurations (especially CDC), and Airbyte internals.
- Provide expert recommendations to the platform team on scaling Airbyte on Kubernetes, advising on best practices for resource management, concurrency tuning, and workload isolation.
- Design and recommend robust monitoring and alerting strategies using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar tools.
- Create and champion best practices for connector development and platform usage, mentoring internal engineers.
What We're Looking For
- Demonstrable, deep expertise with Airbyte, especially in a large-scale environment.
- Proven, expert-level experience developing, maintaining, and troubleshooting custom connectors using the Airbyte Python CDK.
- Expert-level theoretical and practical knowledge of Kubernetes as it pertains to Airbyte (Helm, resource management, scheduling).
- Strong proficiency in Python.
- Deep understanding of troubleshooting complex data integration issues, particularly with databases and Change Data Capture (CDC) mechanisms (e.g., PostgreSQL WAL).
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to advise and mentor technical teams effectively.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with the Airbyte Low-Code CDK or the no-code Connector Builder.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).
- Hands-on experience designing observability strategies for a distributed system using OpenTelemetry.
- Experience contributing to open-source projects.
Technical Stack
- Airbyte, Python, Kubernetes, Helm, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform
Team & Environment
You will partner closely with the platform engineering team as their lead advisor and specialist.




